The Democratic presidential contenders ended their harshest attacks on each other and concentrated on rallying supporters and reaching undecided voters on Friday in a tight four-way sprint to the finish in Iowa's caucuses.
With polls showing a razor-thin spread between John Kerry, Howard Dean, Richard Gephardt and John Edwards entering the race's final three days, they said the contest would hinge on who got their supporters to Monday's caucuses, which begin the 2004 presidential nominating process.
PHOTO: AFP
"This is all down to the last 72 hours, this is who gets their vote out," said Dean, the former Vermont governor who has seen leads in Iowa and New Hampshire disappear or shrink in the last two weeks.
After weeks of negative back-and-forth attacks between Dean and Gephardt that seemed to have backfired as both drifted down in the polls, the two rivals took their most pointed television advertisements off the air in Iowa.
The Dean campaign pulled their advertisement attacking his Washington-based rivals for supporting the war in Iraq, while the Gephardt campaign ended its ad attacking Dean's stance on Medicare spending and Social Security.
"We put it on TV because we were attacked. Dick Gephardt wants to finish this campaign on a positive note," Gephardt campaign manager Steve Murphy told reporters, saying Dean had been hurt the most by a backlash against the ads in Iowa, where voters often punish negative campaigners.
Dean told reporters he also wanted to stay positive in the race's final days. "We took down our ad at the end. We're just trying to go with a positive message -- get to the polls -- and I think that's what people want at the end," he said.
Gephardt, the congressman from neighboring Missouri, is fighting for his political life in Iowa after winning the state during his 1988 presidential bid. He and Dean have the strongest ground organizations heading into the caucuses, the first step toward picking a challenger against US President George W. Bush in November.
Led by Gephardt's army of union members and Dean's grass-roots activists, the candidates will send thousands of volunteers across the state over the next three days to hunt for voters and get them to the caucuses in a turnout effort larger than anything ever seen in Iowa.
The unique nature of the caucuses, which requires participants to leave their homes and cast public votes for their candidates, puts a premium on organizations that can find and track the most likely caucus-goers.
A new Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby tracking poll showed Kerry opening a five-point lead on Dean and Gephardt, with Edwards right behind and 13 percent of likely caucus-goers still undecided.
Polling in Iowa is also complicated by the caucus process and the commitment required, and Dean said he thought the polls were missing many of his supporters.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.